Water embodies a profoundly ambivalent force for me — maternal and abyssal, purifying and destabilising. Precisely because it holds these contradictions simultaneously, it becomes a multidimensional model: a means of simulating altered states of consciousness, a framework for sensory inquiry, and a medium through which trauma healing and meditation can be imagined. Ulrica is conceived to bring this conscious, sensorial, and spiritual “threshold-crossing” onto shore into a theatrical environment.
These qualities have deepened through my practice as a technical diver. Underwater, sound travels at more than four times the speed it does in air, and water’s density favours low frequencies, producing an enveloping, womb-like acoustic field. Underwater vision, meanwhile, collapses familiar perception: refraction distorts scale, and much of the colour spectrum is absorbed.
Water also functions as a carrier of memory and history. Under conditions of slow decay, the ocean preserves undocumented traces of the past: shipwrecks, ruins, and remains. On a planetary scale, it also bears silent witness to tectonic shifts and the assorbitlong arc of species evolution. Ulrica stages this “forgotten centre” as a dramatic site: a space where humans re-enter communion with other forms of life, and connection with trauma and ancestrality is reestablished. By encountering water as a reservoir of emotion and deep time, Ulrica offers an environmental call that does not reiterate ecological crisis, but opens a felt recognition of the world as a shared Eden.
